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FISH AND FISHING IN THE INLE LAKE. 
BY 
N. Annandale, D. Sc., F.A.S.B., 
Director, Zoological Survey of India. 
(With 3 plates.) 
It has been niy lot in the last ten years to visit many lakes, scattered over 
Asia from Japan to Palestine. I know of none so interesting to the naturalist 
and the student of human races as the Inle Lake in the Southern Shan States, 
which I had the good luck to investigate both in 1917 and in 1922. It lies in a 
hollow some three thousand feet above sea-level but bordered on either side by 
mountains fifteen hundred to two thousand feet higher. As in hilly country in 
other parts of Burma and south-eastern Assam, these mountains run almost due 
north and south. At the head of the valley there is an alluvial plain, evidently 
covered at no very distant period by the lake, while to the south the bordering 
mountains gradually dwindle and a stream flows down to Karen -ni, where, more 
than a hundred miles away, it disappears into the ground. That its water 
ultimately reaches the Salween there can be little doubt. The area of the lake 
varies wfith the seasons, but, roughly speaking, it is fourteen miles long, about 
four miles broad and of an irregular oval shape. 
In the physiography of the lake two features are particularly striking, the 
clearness of the water and the floating islands that form a ring roimd the margm. 
Both these features give a peculiar beauty, imique in my experience, to the Inle 
L<ike. The Loktak Lake in Manipur has the floatmg islands, less rich and less 
varied in vegetation but formed in the same way and of the same general 
appearance, but its waters are muddy and turbid. 
Out in the middle of the lake, a mile and a half from any land, the State 
of Ya^vng^vhe maintains a bmigalow for the use of visitors, supported on strong 
wooden posts and stoutly constructed of bamboo matting with wooden floors 
and beams and a thatched roof. Around and under this ideal retreat one can 
watch the fish and the beautiful and highly pecuhar water-snails almost as in 
an aquarium, except that the point of view, natural to an air-breathing animal, 
is from above. In the mornings of early spring the surface is usually un- 
ruffled by the slightest breeze, the water is as clear as glass and the luxuriant 
growth of the submerged weed {Najas minor) provides a background and a floor 
unrivalled in graceful outlines and the beauty of its deep greens and browns. 
The house-posts themselves are veiled in a thin film of fixed vegetable and animal 
life, mostly in delicate tones of rusty tint. 
Round and round the house swims the Inle Herring Barbel (Barbus 
compressiformis)* , a graceful green-backed silvery fish only known from 
tile Inle Lake. The smaller fish congregate in shoals and rush to the surface, 
some little distance beneath which they usually swim, when anything edible or 
otherwise is thrown into the water. If it be edible they await its descent for a 
few inches before attacking it. Everything that it is not too hard or too big 
they find edible, and they are very foul feeders. The larger fish of the same 
species, half a pound or rather more in weight, remain near the bottom and 
swim solitary. They are not attracted by what happens on the surface. From 
their large mouths and from their general structure and appearance, not 
* The species was originally called B. compressus by Boulenger (Ann. Mag 
Nat. Hist (6) XII. p. 202, 1893) and the name was changed at the suggestion of 
the author to B. steadmanensis in 1918 (Rec. Ind. Mus. Vol. XIV, p. 47) In the 
the meanwhile, however, Cockerell had called it B. compressiformis in a paper on 
the scales of fishes (Bull. Bour. Fisher. (AVashington) XXXII, p, 133. 1913). 
